Miss Delectable: Mischief in Mayfair Book One

by Burrowes, Grace

  Dorcas moved away, for she was blushing again. “Then I am no longer needed here. If you have any news to impart regarding John’s situation, please call on me at the vicarage.”

  She wanted distance between herself and Mr. MacKay, or that’s what she should want. What Dorcas truly wanted shocked her.

  To touch his hair again.

  To see him without his shirt.

  To watch the transformation from bearded ruffian to clean-shaven Master of Abercaldy and former officer.

  To ensure that he did not again grow peckish because he was too worried about a teething baby.

  Perhaps she was the one grown light-headed and unsteady.

  Mr. MacKay escorted her as far as the bedroom door. “I will keep John for the next fortnight, and I will not part with the lad until I’m certain he’ll be well cared for. If possible, I’ll send Timmons along with him, and I make you a solemn vow, Dorcas Delancey, that he will never want for anything.”

  His gaze was utterly serious, as if he were in fact taking a solemn vow.

  “I should not have carped at you as I did,” Dorcas said. “That’s why they call me Miss Delightful—because I am not delightful. I am tiresome and difficult.” She made that confession staring at the bare skin of Mr. MacKay’s throat. She was tempted to collapse against him, to give him the weight of all her disappointments, and forget for a time who she was and where the line lay between propriety and folly.

  He really had given her a bad turn.

  “You are delightful,” he murmured, very near her ear. “I keep my promises, Dorcas, and I do not lie. You are maddening, brilliant, determined, and as tenacious as a seagull at a picnic, also entirely delightful. The boy is lucky to have a champion such as you.”

  Something warm and soft brushed Dorcas’s cheek. His lips. He moved away behind the privacy screen with its intriguing collection of portraits.

  She had just been kissed by the dour, unsmiling Alasdhair MacKay, and she had enjoyed it. On that startling revelation, Dorcas slipped out the door.

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